Using Twitter to predict Oscar winners, week 2

First, here are updated results for this week’s tweet numbers. In this post, we’re going to focus on the Best Picture Race. We’ll come back to Best Actor and Best Actress next week.

There has been some movement in these results since last week. This week, Black Swam came out ahead of the King’s Speech in the three volume-based categories – overall reach, number of tweets, and number of unique contributors. The Social Network moved up to #3 in the reach race. Interestingly, the reach:exposure category includes films that don’t show up in the top five of any of the volume categories. The reach:exposure ratio reflects the diversity of the audience seeing tweets about the film, so this suggests that a wide variety of people are receiving tweets about these three films.

We recognize that simple metrics like tweet volume and reach probably aren’t enough to tell us who is going to win. The Oscars aren’t chosen by a popular vote or by members of the viewing public; they’re selected by members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. So, for the purposes of our analysis, we should pay more attention to the tweets posted by people who have some insight into the Academy and what it looks for.

We’ll start with this list of 10 influential film critics on Twitter. So far, only three of these 10 critics have tweeted about who they think will win the Academy Award for Best Picture. And all three of them think it will be The King’s Speech. We’ll check back in on this list next week and see if they’ve changed their minds.

So, what does this mean? Given these results, Black Swan and The King’s Speech seem to be the top contenders for the Best Picture Oscar. However, Inception and The Social Network are not too far behind. There are still three weeks until the Academy Awards, so we’ll be back next week with another round of analysis.